Biblical and Systematic Theology According to the Scriptures

The Holy Spirit as Love and Gift

In his fantastic new book, Engaging the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit, Matthew Levering argues that “the Holy Spirit should be praised and contemplated under proper names ‘Love’ and ‘Gift,’ with respect both to his intra-trinitarian identity and to his historical work in Jesus Christ and the church” (2). This idea is nothing new, as Levering reminds us — these names are used by Hilary of Poitiers and Augustine.

While there is much to be said about his argument — and he acknowledges and engages some pushbacks that I would have about the mystery of trinitarian naming and the elevation of certain aspects over others — I found interesting Levering’s assertion that Thomas Aquinas’s definitions and explanations of trinitarian processions and missions help his case:

What Aquinas provides is a unified and profound arrangement of trinitarian processions and missions, the virtues and gifts of the Spirit, habitual grace and the gratuitous graces, and Jesus’s sinless humanity and supreme charity on the cross. In Aquinas, Jesus’s intimate knowledge of the Father, his miracle working, and his prophetic wisdom are bound together with his supreme charity through the invisible mission of the Holy Spirit, who is Love and Gift in person. … To look upon Christ and the Spirit in this way, of course, requires attending to the Spirit’s upbuilding of the “body of Christ” (1 Cor. 12:27), the church, which occurs preeminently in “the higher gifts” and in the “still more excellent way” (1 Cor. 12:31) that is love. (207-08)

Space precludes me from explaining his entire argument (get the book and read it for yourself), but regardless of how one views trinitarian naming, Levering’s assertion that “The Spirit’s mission is always ordered to those whom Jesus came to redeem, and thus to the kingdom of God” (198) pushes us to think about the fittedness for elevating these aspects of the Spirit’s role and mission.